While the network developed and grew to handle millions of barrels of crude oil and thousands of tons of other goods, the mystery also persisted as to how much of it was known to the Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and whether it had his approval. The Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) began an investigation a year ago into some of those involved, but no further progress has been made in the Mexican justice system. The agency’s action was not only insufficient but came too late, just when Washington was ready to impose financial sanctions against Joaquín Leal and other protagonists of the business. 

However, an investigation by EL PAÍS and Armando.info, based on thousands of internal documents of the network, found evidence that at least one instance of the Mexican government could have acted as an ally of the network. As per papers of company Libre Abordo, it portrayed itself as a company designated by the Mexican government to carry out this type of transactions, and as a client of Segalmex —the food security agency of the Mexican State.

In addition, documents in possession of both media and interviews with several sources confirm a relationship between young businessman Joaquín Leal – at the apex of the plot – and the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs for Latin America and the Caribbean, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga. The number two of the Foreign Ministry says in his defense that, as part of his responsibility, it is essential to support “every Mexican company, regardless of its name, regardless of its political or partisan position.” “We assume that the businessmen who approach us do so in good faith and wish to have better economic ties in the region,” adds Reyes in response to this report. 

“Libre Abordo was appointed by the Mexican government to join the humanitarian oil-for-food exchange program with Venezuela for the purpose of selling a variety of foodstuffs to be traded between both countries,” the company assures in a corporate presentation prepared in January 2020, which is part of the documents in the hands of both media. In the presentation, the company created ad hoc by Joaquín Leal for business transactions with Venezuela, explains that the agreement was conceived in a series of bilateral conversations between Caracas and Mexico City authorities.

All Aboard

The same presentation indicates that Libre Abordo reached an agreement with Segalmex, the government agency for food production and distribution. “Segalmex receives instructions from the federal government of Mexico to continue with the humanitarian aid, aiming to benefit the people of Mexico and Venezuela,” the document reads. According to Libre Abordo’s version, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration instructed Segalmex to sell 210,000 tons of corn to Libre Abordo, destined for Venezuela. The amount coincides with the operation that Libre Abordo carried out in June 2019 with the state-owned Corporación Venezolana de Comercio Exterior (Corpovex). Two contracts were signed to supply those tons of corn and 1,000 tankers of drinking water in exchange for two million barrels of oil ⸺a two hundred-million euro operation.

Another document from the electronic file obtained for this journalistic investigation adds up. In the search for clients willing to process the PDVSA oil that had been exchanged for food, in early 2020, Libre Abordo contacted Reliance, the Indian refinery. Apropos of the due diligence process initiated by the Asian company to certify its prospective new supplier, Libre Abordo submitted a letter dated December 16, 2019, with the letterhead of Segalmex, the agency that was to sell to this company the corn intended for Venezuela. “We hereby confirm that we have received instructions from the Mexican government to proceed with this deal,” reads the missive that bears the purported signature of Segalmex’s then head of Administration and Finance, René Gavira. “The corn will be distributed in three deliveries scheduled for the third week of January 2020, the third week of February and the third week of March.” Sources close to the former official, who left office in June last year tangled up in corruption accusations, assure that the signature on the letter is not Gavira’s and claim that it was forged by Leal and his collaborators.

Libre Abordo also submitted proof of a bank transfer of December 11, 2019 to Segalmex for 330.6 million pesos ($15 million), as an advance for the delivery of the 210,000 tons of corn of the initial operation. The company that made the payment was Consorcio Panamericano SA de CV, a Mexican company in which Leal’s grandmother is a partner along with alleged front men, who participated in other entities of the businessman. Libre Abordo assured in the emails sent to Reliance that Consorcio Panamericano granted them a “loan” to complete the transaction. When ask on this matter for this report, Segalmex answered that it “will not comment” on the alleged transaction.

Those initial two million barrels negotiated in June 2019 turned to be at least 30 million barrels of crude oil in shipments that sailed between November 2019 and May 2020. According to emails in the possession of EL PAÍS and Armando.info, Libre Abordo explained that the jump from two to 30 million barrels was due to the international fall in the price of crude oil, since the equivalence of the exchanged goods had changed to the detriment of the Venezuelan party. The Mexican company sought advice from law firms to complete the operations through bartering under the guise of “humanitarian aid.”

The transaction, which included corn and tanker trucks in exchange for Venezuelan crude oil, undertook to alleviate the misfortunes of the regime in Caracas. Pressured by the U.S. sanctions imposed on some of its top officials and agencies, such as the state oil company PDVSA and the Central Bank of Venezuela, the Maduro government was facing more and more difficulties to place its dwindling crude oil production in international markets and obtain foreign currency. A professed humanitarian swap seemed to provide a convincing enough façade for the transaction to pass Washington’s scrutiny.

Despite the schemes, in the end, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Libre Abordo and Joaquín Leal for doing business with Venezuela, a measure announced a year ago, in June 2020. At that point, the Mexican FIU started an investigation to follow the trail of the 200 million euros. The investigation made little progress until last May 18, when the FIU filed a complaint to the Attorney General’s Office requesting the seizure of a hundred or so accounts of Leal and Libre Abordo, as confirmed in this investigation. However, to date, there has not been any official pronouncement about the alleged agreements with Segalmex.

Real Link

Two testimonials sources assured the authors of this investigation that Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga, the number two of the Mexican Foreign Ministry, enabled the approach between Leal and Segalmex in 2019. As these sources confirmed, the first contacts took place at a meeting in Monterrey, capital of the State of Nuevo León, with senior officials of the Venezuelan government, who visited Mexico and proposed to open a channel of institutional communication between the two administrations. That meeting was held shortly after the visit to Caracas of a group of Mexican businessmen, including José Adolfo Murat, Leal’s former partner. Then, based on the documentation obtained, there was a meeting with Omar Abou Nassif, brother of a businessman close to Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who raised the possibility of using the Chihuahua branch of Industrias Lácteas Asturianas (ILA, producer of the Reny Picot brand) as a supplier in Mexico. Sources close to Segalmex confirmed this information. 

In the course of this investigative series, of which this report is a part, Joaquín Leal and the Venezuelan government were requested to give their versions, but no request received a response. 

The Administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the National Renewal Movement (Movimiento de Renovación Nacional – Morena), although leftist, has maintained an ambiguous position regarding the Venezuelan conflict since he came to power. He certainly avoided recognizing the opposition leader and president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, something that pleased Maduro, but at the same time he has helped to bring Venezuelan opponents out to give them asylum in Mexico. The relations of the Chavista government and the Venezuelan opposition with the Mexican diplomacy are close and frequent, to the point that Mexico is emerging as the prospective venue for an upcoming negotiation between both parties to seek a way out of the political and humanitarian crisis that has become chronic in the South American country. As to President López Obrador, who does not hold back his opinion on all kinds of matters at his morning conferences, has referred to Venezuela on very few occasions. Three days before the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Mexican businessmen, he said that he would be willing to collaborate with humanitarian aid if the government of Caracas required it. “It (the Venezuelan government) has not made any request to us. But if it made a request pertaining a humanitarian need, we would act on it.”

Mexico did not need to have a leftist government to act as one of the apexes of a surreptitious trade scheme with the Chavista Venezuela. Already in 2016, under the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, of the once hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional – PRI), businessmen close to Nicolás Maduro, such as Alex Saab, found in Mexico the suppliers to buy tons of food that were sent to Venezuela in the CLAP boxes. In 2018, the then authorities of the Office of Mexico’s Attorney General opened an investigation against that business —virtually on the eve of the elections won by López Obrador— for finding evidence of poor quality products and overpricing in the shipments. However, the case resulted in only small fines for the companies involved. 

But the potential involvement of a government entity and the fact that a senior Foreign Affairs official, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga, was aware of –or perhaps even promoted- the business scheme, would assign an unprecedented level of commitment by the Mexican government. 

Even though no other evidence has been found to confirm the link with Segalmex, there is no doubt about the relationship between Joaquín Leal —the young entrepreneur who took over the reins of the circuit from Mexico to evade international sanctions against the Chavista regime— and the number two of the Mexican Foreign Ministry, the Undersecretary (Vice Minister) of Foreign Affairs for Latin America and the Caribbean, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga. Leal and Reyes met at least twice in two restaurants in Mexico City before the deal between company Libre Abordo and Corpovex was closed, as the reporters confirmed with three different sources.

A Venezuelan Woman with Dual Loyalty

Those meetings set a public precedent pertaining the ties between Leal and Reyes, due to a column by Carlos Loret de Mola in the Mexico City newspaper, El Universal. The influential Mexican journalist brought into the open a letter, dated June 20, 2019, less than a week after the contracts between Libre Abordo and Corpovex were signed. The letter was to the attention of the Venezuelan government, where a Venezuelan, Haymel Brito Martínez, appears as a member of the Mexican delegation to the 49th General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS), held in those days in Medellín, Colombia. Haymel Brito was the only participant of the Mexican delegation headed by Reyes, who did not hold a high diplomatic position. In his column, Loret de Mola described Brito as “an influential woman in the Mexican Foreign Ministry” and wondered how it was possible that a diplomatic official “representing two countries” simultaneously, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates, could have been born “in another country,” Venezuela. After the spreading of the letter, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) decided to leave Brito out of the delegation. Facing at least two requests for information, the Foreign Ministry denied that the woman worked at the Undersecretariat for Latin America. Nor does she appear in the directory as a fee-for-service employee of that office.

Based on her curriculum vitae, Brito Martínez has been a representative of Fedecámaras – Venezuela’s main business union –, analyst of the International Organization of Employers, intern at the United Nations, and has worked for the office of the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates in Mexico. It was during that stage of service for the Arab country, in late 2018, when the first meeting between Brito and Reyes took place, as at least two sources affirmed.

During the transition period from the government of Enrique Peña Nieto to that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in September 2018, the former mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, visited the UAE Embassy, as appointed foreign ministry. He was accompanied by part of his team, including the current undersecretary for Latin America and the Caribbean, Reyes Zúñiga. Soon after, Reyes and Brito began to actively interact on the social media and traveled together to different places, like Panama City, Buenos Aires and Barcelona, as this investigation has been able to verify.

Haymel Brito’s personal relationship with Joaquín Leal is also a fact, as evidenced by photos and messages on social media of her together with the closest entourage of the Mexican businessman. In July 2019, Brito began working as a director of Institutional Relations for Hábitos Luzy, the Mexican subsidiary of Luzy Technologies, one of the companies that were blacklisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury along with Libre Abordo, and also part of Leal’s portfolio. The company specialized in health and food, and its most noticeable product was a mobile application to provide medical advice. From her position at Luzy, Brito managed the sale of medicines and medical equipment to the Panamanian government, directly supported by the Mexican Embassy in the Central American country.

On December 10, 2019, Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga traveled to Buenos Aires to represent Mexico at the inauguration of Argentine President Alberto Fernández. According to transparency records, on that trip, the undersecretary made a stop in Panama to “hold meetings at the Mexican Embassy.” That same day, Brito shared on her social media pages that she was in Panama. Based on the emails, she visited the Mexican Embassy during that trip to discuss trade agreements between Luzy and the Panamanian government. In late 2019, the Mexican ambassador to Panama, Luis Manuel López Moreno, began to report his progress on behalf of the company to the Venezuelan woman, whom he called “master.” “We will meet before Friday to talk about the [Luzy] application. I will let you know as soon as I have an outcome,” the ambassador wrote to Brito in an email on December 16 about a meeting he had with a businessman, just a week after the visit. “Very well, ambassador,” she replied.

In a written response for this investigation, Venezuelan Haymel Brito assures that her “external advisory services” to Hábitos Luzy concluded in 2019 “and that had nothing to do with Venezuela or affairs in that country (...) I have no relationship with any Mexican government institution.” She adds that she learned about Libre Abordo through the publications of EL PAÍS newspaper in 2020, “when I was no longer there” [at Luzy].

Reyes’ Man in Caracas

The shadow of the Foreign Ministry over the Venezuelan oil scheme also extends to the Mexican Embassy in Caracas, especially with Reyes’ right-hand man in that delegation —Rodrigo Benedith Reyes. Both officials have known each other for at least a decade, when the now deputy foreign minister was a legislator in the Mexico City Assembly in 2009 for the Democratic Revolution Party (Partido de la Revolución Democrática – PRD, a leftist political party from which López Obrador and Morena broke away in September 2012) and the other was an advisor to the legislature. They also worked together as area directors in the Miguel Hidalgo borough (municipality) of Mexico City from 2012 to 2013. In September 2019, Benedith held the position of director of Urban Services of the Mayor’s Office of Azcapotzalco – another metropolitan municipality – when he was appointed, without any experience in the diplomatic sector, to be in charge of the economic cooperation and promotion of the Mexican representation in Venezuela. His name appears in the emails of Leal’s circle, who also boasted of having “contacts in Embassies and consulates.”

In an email that Joaquín Leal sent to his team on September 12, 2019, when the official had just arrived in office, the businessman asks them to send Benedith some cards and a contract.

The name of the Mexican official also appears in other communications. As in one dated April 1, 2020, in which the director of Libre Abordo, Olga María Zepeda Esparza, sends an email to the Mexican Embassy in Caracas informing his agreements with PDVSA. “We would like to give you some context related to our work as a Mexican company that provides humanitarian aid in Venezuela in exchange for oil,” reads the message, addressed to Benedith Reyes.

For this investigation, the reporters sent a detailed questionnaire to Maximiliano Reyes Zúñiga with ten questions on each of these specific issues. The undersecretary agreed to answer but with a general statement of nine paragraphs on the powers and objectives of his office, without confirming or denying anything. 

“As undersecretary for Latin America and the Caribbean, my responsibility is to be in permanent contact with all the governments of the region, based on the criteria set forth by the Mexican Constitution, which have always been publicly stated. Our principle is the utmost respect for the sovereignty of each country, and as far as possible, we are always willing to cooperate and collaborate in social, economic, cultural, humanitarian and commercial matters. And in this regard, we do not make exceptions with any government nor do we submit ourselves to the foreign policy of any country,” assures Reyes in his answer, who claims that he works “in favor of a solid and fluid dialogue with the private sector to improve the economic and commercial dynamics of our country in the region.” 

In this sense, Reyes assures that for his Undersecretariat (ministry division) “it is essential to support every Mexican company, regardless of its name, regardless of its political or partisan position. We assume that the businessmen who approach us do so in good faith and wish to have better economic ties in the region, based on a fundamental principle: win-win-win (Mexico wins, the country concerned wins, the businessman wins). In light of this, we have productive relations with many Mexican and foreign companies that fortunately see us as allies to facilitate their expansion, in the same way that other governments do with their companies.” Regarding the U.S. sanctions imposed on Libre Abordo and Leal, Reyes said, “Our line is public. We will never agree to solve anything through force or coercion, nor through sanctions. Our position is public and evident. We have always voted the same way in international organizations.”

Finally, regarding him knowing Joaquín Leal, he affirms that he “knew” the businessman together with “a group of Mexican and foreign investors in the energy sector, with whom I have had no contact for several months, before the sanctions were made public. My talks with them where about the same as with many other economic and business environments.”

* This is the second installment of the series “Mexican Bypass against the Sanctions” that Armando.info produced and publishes jointly with the newspaper El País of Madrid.

In April 2019, a month after Venezuela burned out into darkness, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez picked up the phone and contacted a group of Mexican businessmen that mastered the electricity sector. Originally, the idea was to see how they could bring power plants to Venezuela to ease the effects of the electricity crisis. However, from the first trip of the businessmen to Caracas, it was clear that their business intentions went beyond the acquisition of power generators. Several members of the Venezuelan government and operators of the Chavista leadership proposed what would become the germ of an international plot to generate an untraceable business. EL PAÍS and Armando.info have thousands of documents that, together with dozens of interviews―including some persons involved who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliations―attest to how this shady network was created and developed. A scheme that first exchanged oil for food and drinking water tankers, and then went on to collect money from oil exports through financial circuits outside the control of the United States of America. All those involved have a common link, Alex Saab, a contractor of Chavismo since 2011, who is said to be Nicolás Maduro’s front man, and is awaiting extradition in Cape Verde to be tried on money laundering in the U.S.

The origin of this network lies in the sanctions imposed on Venezuela since late 2014, mainly by Washington, under Obama’s and then Trump’s administration, to exert pressure on Maduro’s government in an attempt to stop the human rights violations, and openly forcing a political change that never came. Today, with Joe Biden recently installed in the White House, the sanctions are a bargaining chip in a potential negotiation between the opposition and the heir of Chávez to find a way out of the crisis in the country. 

These exertions did reduce the leeway of Chavismo to do business with many companies, as they fear being the target of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. And PDVSA has been the bull’s eye of all the pressure, as it is the great source of foreign currency to Venezuela, the country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world, sanctioned since early 2019 by the Trump administration. After the state-owned oil company reached a point where foreign currency was scarce after the government spent it in all sorts of operations, Chavismo resorted to business transactions that allow them to pay with crude oil instead of money.

Delcy Rodríguez Gómez was key to activate the Mexican link. Along with her brother Jorge―current president of the National Assembly and former minister in several occasions-, they constitute one of the pillars of Nicolás Maduro’s government and a duo whose power has allowed them to displace Diosdado Cabello, as the unofficial number two of Chavismo. The former foreign minister and current vice-president scheduled in April 2019 a series of meetings between state officials and operators who were close to the Chavista leadership and a group of Mexican businessmen, including politician José Adolfo Murat, whom she knew from international forums of leftist organizations, like the one in Biarritz. With Simón Zerpa, the then Minister of Economy ―now in decline after accusations of disloyalty-, the possibility of an exchange of crude oil for tankers of drinking water and food was verbalized. Moreover, the minister asked the Mexicans whether it was possible to have a key post in Veracruz―the main port of Mexico from where companies linked to Alex Saab dispatched millions of low-quality and overpriced foodstuffs in CLAP boxes to Venezuela from 2016 to 2018―, which would allow large-scale shipments to get in and out.

The next meeting was between the Mexicans and Ricardo Morón ―sanctioned by Washington in July 2020, a businessman close to Nicolás Maduro Guerra, son of the President― and José Luis Sandoval, a PDVSA official. They raise the point of the need to exchange oil for white corn and durum wheat through Colombia ⸺the price and payment would be quoted in gold.

They also met with Omar Abou Nassif, brother of a businessman close to Delcy Rodríguez. Nassif suggested the Mexicans the possibility of moving some foodstuffs with transactions to be made through Hong Kong, assuring them that he counted on the collaboration of some suppliers in Mexico. Nassif’s statement was not trivial. He had also participated since 2016 in the CLAP scheme, precisely with companies registered in Hong Kong. Between 2016 and 2018, Alex Saab and his partner, the also Colombian Álvaro Pulido Vargas ―whose real name was Germán Rubio, but changed it after being involved in 2000 in a drug trafficking operation linked to the Bogota cartel― devised a structure of shell companies in Hong Kong, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The Mexican businessmen benefited from these companies, some of which -as it has been proved- were linked to the new network that began to be woven in April 2019. The figure of Alex Saab also appears in those meetings in Caracas, since the Mexican businessmen met with one of his operators.

That series of contacts was taking shape upon his return to Mexico. Then, according to the reconstruction made through this investigation conducted by EL PAÍS and Armando.info, Joaquín Leal appeared on the scene ―a 29-year-old businessman, who the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned since June 2020 for his business with Venezuela, and who, at that time, worked at Diversidad, the company of the above mentioned José Adolfo Murat, with whom he began to develop the business proposed to them. 

In May 2019, Murat flies to Caracas with Leal. The Mexican businessmen meet again with Simón Zerpa. The aim is to materialize the operations that have only been discussed until then. Although Zerpa proposes to the Mexicans to receive direct payments in rubles or euros, the formula adopted is the exchange of oil for food and drinking water tankers.

The formula selected that they would implement a month later without Murat, only with Leal, as counterpart, implied that the Venezuelan party would ask a third actor to pay the Mexicans a 70% advance in euros. There is no account number of the recipient of the payment in either of the two contracts of the operation amounting to 200 million euros. “To the competent bodies,” it is the peculiar formula used in both cases, which also states that this payment may be made “in installments” and there is the possibility of terminating the contract within 90 days. Under the contracts, the remaining 30% of the payment “will be processed by buyer through competent financing entities,” and nothing else is said about the person referred to.

After signing the trade agreements, Leal sought advice and was responsible for finding the trucks and coordinating the transfer of the food from Mexico. He also negotiated the price of oil with his Venezuelan contacts. In the emails he portrayed himself as the legal representative of Libre Abordo, the company with which the Venezuelan government made the deal. After closing the deal, the Venezuelan oil company sent a series of invoices to Libre Abordo “to the attention” of Olga María Zepeda Esparza, director and partner of the company - currently sanctioned by the U.S. - detailing the equivalent in barrels of oil and the millions of euros that the oil company demanded as payment to the Mexican firm, in addition to the barter for food and products in kind. For example, an invoice dated June 19, 2020 for 32.9 million euros (equal to 36.3 million dollars at that time) states that the destination of the oil was the port of Singapore.

The oil-for-food and water tanker operation was the trigger for the U.S. Department of the Treasury to sanction Libre Abordo, Joaquín Leal and Zepeda Esparza a year later, in June 2020. Then, Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF), headed by Santiago Nieto, launched an investigation to follow the money trail. The results, however, are negligible. Just last May 18, the UIF filed a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office―to which we have had access for this report―and requested the seizure of about a hundred accounts of Libre Abordo, Leal, Zepeda Esparza and his mother, Veronica Esparza, a partner in the company.

The trip in that spring was the only one that Murat and Leal made together to Caracas. Murat, consulted for this report, assures that he left the business in Leal’s hands when he returned from Venezuela. When Leal told Murat that the Venezuelan party insisted on including an oil swap as part of the deal, Murat asked him not to go ahead. “I told him there were U.S. sanctions and we couldn’t get into that mess,” he said. According to Murat’s version, he broke off the relationship with Leal months later, in 2019, upon realizing that despite the warnings, Leal had continued with the business from Libre Abordo.

On the other hand, Leal did not want to give his version or an answer to the interview requests for this investigation.

The Venezuelan vice president was also asked to give her version, but no response was received at the time of closing this release.

The ‘humanitarian’ aspect was a mere excuse

From the operations for tank trucks and corn, Leal, together with Alex Saab, organized a secret network from Mexico at the service of Maduro’s government for the country to sell Venezuelan oil regardless of U.S. sanctions. In an attempt to hide the money trail, he created dozens of companies and weaved a network of financial partners in some thirty countries. The scheme is connected to entities worldwide, some offshore, in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Malta, Curacao, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Greece, United States of America, Singapore, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Mexico, among other countries in Europe, Asia and America and tax havens; for example, the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.

The modus operandi reconstructed in this investigation shows that the provision of humanitarian aid was just a pretext. The Mexican side shipped the products in kind and PDVSA paid them with oil and logistics to take it out of the country in ships. However, behind this operation, a more complex one was hidden, generating millions in profits for those involved through the resale of crude oil at below-market prices, with money that eventually returned to PDVSA as payment for the merchandise. The Venezuelan oil company ended up charging the invoices issued to Libre Abordo against accounts in Russian banks, such as Gazprombank and Evrofinance Mosnarbank. Thus, they were able to carry out the transactions outside the U.S. banking system, without involving U.S. citizens. The documents at hand for this investigation show that the oil deals were in place from November 2019 to May 2020. In most cases, food barter was set aside and oil was sold directly to Mexican intermediaries.

After Libre Abordo agreed upon the transport of oil from Venezuela, it used a group of intermediaries to proceed with the resale of the barrels. It usually sought buyers from the same consortium involved in the scheme or refineries abroad. For example, a shipment delivered in Malaysia to a Chinese company was resold by Orin Energy, a holding company engaged in raw materials. Leal and Libre Abordo’s network had its main clients in Asia. In the corporate presentations, it is stated that two of the main buyers of Venezuelan oil were the Chinese companies PetroChina and Sinopec. Most of its shipments were also sent to Singapore and Malaysia, two major world refining centers.

In a first stage, Libre Abordo looked for clients and ways to place the oil in the global energy market. When the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned the Mexican company in June 2020, it indicated that the company used the same international routes, the same shipping processes and the same clients that two Swiss subsidiaries of the oil company Rosneft had used in the past. The Russian giant was one of PDVSA’s main partners, but left the business in February 2020 after being sanctioned by Washington for its dealings with Venezuela. Leal and his partners also consulted other participants in the scheme designed from the government of Maduro, like Alessandro Bazzoni, an Italian with a long history of business with PDVSA, and Philipp Apikian, a Swiss who has also been involved in the sale and shipment of Venezuelan oil. The White House sanctioned both in January 2021, as participants in the same scheme that has moved millions of barrels of Venezuelan crude oil under the radar of the U.S. sanctions.

La trama de petróleo por alimentos

EE UU impuso desde 2014 restricciones económicas a Venezuela para asfixiar al Gobierno de Maduro

1

Las sanciones de Estados Unidos

Gobierno

de Maduro

Petróleo

PDVSA

EE UU cierra el mercado internacional de Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). El país pierde su principal fuente de divisas.

Dinero

2

El Gobierno venezolano

evade las sanciones

PDVSA

El Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro aprovecha las rutas de las petroleras rusas para seguir comerciando su crudo con otros países

Los pagos se realizan en euros o rublos para evitar a la banca estadounidense

Rusia

India

China

Irán

3

Venezuela necesita nuevos socios

PDVSA

La empresa mexicana Libre Abordo pacta un intercambio de maíz y camiones cisterna de agua potable por petróleo de PDVSA

México

4

La trama se extiende

En una fase más avanzada, empresas comercializadoras mexicanas firman contratos en los que ofrecen a sacar el petróleo de Venezuela y revenderlo

Dinero

China

Singapur

Malasia

Irán

Bangladés

Palestina

India

Fuente: elaboración propia.

N. CATALÁN / EL PAÍS

La trama de petróleo por alimentos

EE UU impuso desde 2014 restricciones económicas a Venezuela para asfixiar al Gobierno de Maduro

1

Las sanciones de Estados Unidos

Gobierno

de Maduro

Petróleo

PDVSA

EE UU cierra el mercado internacional de Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). El país pierde su principal fuente de divisas.

Dinero

2

El Gobierno venezolano

evade las sanciones

PDVSA

El Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro aprovecha las rutas de las petroleras rusas para seguir comerciando su crudo con otros países

Los pagos se realizan en euros o rublos para evitar a la banca estadounidense

Rusia

India

China

Irán

3

Venezuela necesita nuevos socios

PDVSA

La empresa mexicana Libre Abordo pacta un intercambio de maíz y camiones cisterna de agua potable por petróleo de PDVSA

México

4

La trama se extiende

En una fase más avanzada, empresas comercializadoras mexicanas firman contratos en los que ofrecen a sacar el petróleo de Venezuela y revenderlo

Dinero

China

Singapur

Malasia

Irán

Bangladés

Palestina

India

Fuente: elaboración propia.

N. CATALÁN / EL PAÍS

La trama de petróleo por alimentos

EE UU impuso desde 2014 restricciones económicas a Venezuela para asfixiar al Gobierno de Maduro

1

Las sanciones de Estados Unidos

Gobierno

de Maduro

Petróleo

PDVSA

EE UU cierra el mercado internacional de Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). El país pierde su principal fuente de divisas.

Dinero

2

El Gobierno venezolano evade las sanciones

PDVSA

El Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro aprovecha las rutas de las petroleras rusas para seguir comerciando su crudo con otros países

Los pagos se realizan en euros o rublos para evitar a la banca estadounidense

Rusia

India

China

Irán

3

Venezuela necesita nuevos socios

PDVSA

La empresa mexicana Libre Abordo pacta un intercambio de maíz y camiones cisterna de agua potable por petróleo de PDVSA

México

4

La trama se extiende

En una fase más avanzada, empresas comercializadoras mexicanas firman contratos en los que ofrecen a sacar el petróleo de Venezuela y revenderlo

Dinero

China

Singapur

Malasia

India

Irán

Bangladés

Palestina

Fuente: elaboración propia.

N. CATALÁN / EL PAÍS

La trama de petróleo por alimentos

EE UU impuso desde 2014 restricciones económicas a Venezuela para asfixiar al Gobierno de Maduro

Venezuela necesita

nuevos socios

La trama

se extiende

Las sanciones de

Estados Unidos

El Gobierno venezolano

evade las sanciones

1

2

3

4

Gobierno

de Maduro

PDVSA

PDVSA

China

India

Los pagos se realizan en euros o rublos para evitar a la banca estadounidense

Singapur

Petróleo

Malasia

PDVSA

México

Irán

Bangladés

Palestina

Dinero

Dinero

Rusia

India

China

Irán

En una fase más avanzada, comercializadoras mexicanas firman contratos en los que ofrecen a sacar el petróleo de Venezuela y revenderlo

EE UU cierra el mercado internacional de Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). El país pierde su principal fuente de divisas.

El Gobierno de Maduro aprovecha las rutas de las petroleras rusas para seguir comerciando su crudo con otros países

La empresa mexicana Libre Abordo pacta un intercambio de maíz y camiones cisterna de agua potable por petróleo de PDVSA

Fuente: elaboración propia.

N. CATALÁN / EL PAÍS

Las diversas redes operaban en 30 países a través de más de 50 empresas

Fuente: elaboración propia.

EL PAÍS

Las diversas redes operaban en 30 países a través de más de 50 empresas

Fuente: elaboración propia.

EL PAÍS

Las diversas redes operaban en 30 países a través de más de 50 empresas

Fuente: elaboración propia.

EL PAÍS

Protagonistas de la trama

Gobierno venezolano

Delcy

Rodríguez

Vicepresidenta

Nicolás

Maduro

Presidente

Tareck

El Aissami

Ministro del Petróleo

PDVSA

CORPOVEX

Corporación Venezolana

de Comercio Exterior

Conseguidor

Álex Saab

Supuesto testaferro.

Negocio de los CLAP*

Empresarios

J. L. Sandoval

Ricardo Morón

Omar Nassif

Negocio de

los CLAP*

Programa

Petróleo por

alimentos

Empresarios

Empresarios

mexicanos

Alessandro Bazzoni

Joaquín Leal

Philipp Apikian

Verónica Esparza

(madre)

Francisco D’Agostino

Olga Mª Zepeda Esparza

(hija)

ELEMENTO

SWISSOIL TRADING

LIBRE ABORDO

SCHLAGER BUSINESS

WASHINGTON TRADING

ALEL TECHNOLOGIES

Intermediarios

navieros

y financieros

LUZY TECHNOLOGIES

COSMO RESOURCES

MÁS DE 50 EMPRESAS

EN 30 PAÍSES

Clientes finales

PetroChina

Sinopec

Refinerías en Asia

* Cajas de comida subsidiadas y distribuidas por los CLAP

(Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción)

Fuente: elaboración propia.

EL PAÍS

Protagonistas de la trama

Gobierno venezolano

Delcy

Rodríguez

Vicepresidenta

Nicolás

Maduro

Presidente

Tareck

El Aissami

Ministro del Petróleo

PDVSA

CORPOVEX

Corporación Venezolana

de Comercio Exterior

Conseguidor

Álex Saab

Supuesto testaferro.

Negocio de los CLAP*

Empresarios

J. L. Sandoval

Ricardo Morón

Omar Nassif

Negocio de

los CLAP*

Programa

Petróleo por

alimentos

Empresarios

Empresarios

mexicanos

Alessandro Bazzoni

Joaquín Leal

Philipp Apikian

Verónica Esparza

(madre)

Francisco D’Agostino

Olga Mª Zepeda Esparza

(hija)

ELEMENTO

SWISSOIL TRADING

LIBRE ABORDO

SCHLAGER BUSINESS

WASHINGTON TRADING

ALEL TECHNOLOGIES

Intermediarios

navieros

y financieros

LUZY TECHNOLOGIES

COSMO RESOURCES

MÁS DE 50 EMPRESAS

EN 30 PAÍSES

Clientes finales

PetroChina

Sinopec

Refinerías en Asia

* Cajas de comida subsidiadas y distribuidas por los CLAP

(Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción)

Fuente: elaboración propia.

EL PAÍS

Protagonistas de la trama

Gobierno venezolano

Delcy

Rodríguez

Vicepresidenta

Nicolás

Maduro

Presidente

Tareck

El Aissami

Ministro del Petróleo

PDVSA

CORPOVEX

Corporación Venezolana

de Comercio Exterior

Conseguidor

Álex Saab

Supuesto testaferro.

Negocio de los CLAP*

Empresarios

J. L. Sandoval

Ricardo Morón

Omar Nassif

Programa

Petróleo por

alimentos

Negocio de los CLAP*

Empresarios

Empresarios

mexicanos

Alessandro Bazzoni

Joaquín Leal

Philipp Apikian

Verónica Esparza

(madre)

Francisco D’Agostino

Olga Mª Zepeda Esparza

(hija)

ELEMENTO

SWISSOIL TRADING

LIBRE ABORDO

SCHLAGER BUSINESS

WASHINGTON TRADING

ALEL TECHNOLOGIES

Intermediarios navieros y financieros

LUZY TECHNOLOGIES

COSMO RESOURCES

MÁS DE 50 EMPRESAS EN 30 PAÍSES

Clientes finales

PetroChina

Sinopec

Refinerías en Asia

* Cajas de comida subsidiadas y distribuidas por los CLAP

(Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción)

Fuente: elaboración propia.

EL PAÍS

An old acquaintance of PDVSA

One of the central intermediaries that Leal used to resell the crude oil was Elemento, a company incorporated by Bazzoni in Malta, in March 2015, with subsidiaries in the Caribbean island of Curacao and the United Kingdom, and which had previously traded Venezuelan oil in association with an American company. Elemento moved at least thirteen PDVSA cargoes between February and December 2019. Following the dealings with Leal, Bazzoni’s company took over one of the first two cargoes that Libre Abordo took out of Venezuela. The merchandise resold by Elemento was delivered in Singapore to a Macao company ―a former Portuguese enclave in China, with a sovereignty status similar to Hong Kong until 2049 ― in April 2020, almost a year after it sailed from the Caribbean country.

It was not the first time that Elemento helped the Maduro government to take hundreds of millions of barrels of oil off the coast of the South American country, according to the thousands of documents in the hands of the two media that are part of this investigation. To resell the shipments, Elemento used Swissoil Trading S.A., an energy company founded in Switzerland in 1998, which has acted as a reseller of raw materials in the Middle East and Asia, with Apikian as the sole administrator. With the intention of replicating this scheme devised by Elemento and reducing the losses and legal issues of resorting to other intermediaries to resell crude, on February 11, 2020, Leal founded Cosmo Resources in Singapore. The aim, according to an organizational chart designed by Leal himself, was to share the company’s board of directors with his partner Bazzoni to continue marketing oil in Asia and other parts of the world.

Through company Cosmo, the Mexican businessman explored the idea of absorbing Libre Abordo and its subsidiary Schlager Business Group, in charge of giving administrative support to the operations of its parent company. On February 16, 2020, Leal sent an email indicating that he was considering the possibility of Cosmo buying Libre Abordo. A day later, Hugo Villaseñor, Cosmo’s CFO and a close friend of Leal, coordinated the opening of a bank account for the company. In an email sent to an executive of Alpha FX, a London-based bank specializing in foreign exchange and offering its services internationally for “companies and institutions affected by currency liability,” Villaseñor requested the opening of the account, estimating a monthly flow of money ranging from 15 to 50 million euros. The account was opened on the recommendation of Richard Rothenberg, CFO of Elemento.

Cosmo’s role is crucial to understanding how the oil trades were capitalized under the guise of humanitarian aid. In the application to open the account, the company explained that its main source of income came from payments made by PetroChina and Sinopec refineries for oil shipments from Venezuela. Other income came from payments made by other commodities intermediaries, such as Beaconsfield Commodities Trading, a Bazzoni consortium incorporated in Switzerland, with subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, South Africa, Switzerland and Sweden., On the other hand, the main cash outflows of Cosmo were payments made to Elemento and Libre Abordo, which were in charge of taking the oil out of Venezuela. One of the plans of the young Mexican businessman was to do the same business he had done with PDVSA and other Latin American oil companies, like Pemex, Colombia’s Ecopetrol, and Petroecuador.

Mexicans instead of Russians

Rosneft’s exit from Venezuela propelled the business of Leal and his partners. With the departure of the Russian giant, one of PDVSA’s main partners, the quantities of crude oil to which the Mexican network had access skyrocketed. According to the Department of the Treasury, by April 2020, Mexican businessmen received around 40% of the Venezuelan oil company’s exports. But it is true that the more their businesses boomed, the more Leal became concerned about the legal status of the deals of his companies with Venezuela. In December 2019, he sought advice at the U.S. law firm, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. In March 2020, when Leal was already under the scrutiny of the United States of America, a Mexican law firm also issued its legal opinion on the sanctions that Leal and Libre Abordo were likely to face.

From Mexico, Leal designed different schemes to do business with Venezuela, and used financial engineering to manage his assets in an attempt to erase the money trail. The documentation in the hands of EL PAÍS and Armando.info contains thousands of emails exchanged between the members of Leal’s plot: Spreadsheets with the value of crude oil and the monthly flows from marketing the shipments, as well as export contracts, invoices of purchase and sale operations and financial advisory services. There are also bank references, business plans considering the possibility of entering the copper and aluminum market, and a list of payments for general and administrative costs of the different companies in the network, i.e. rent, utilities and international travel expenses.

A document with the income of Leal’s companies recorded in 2019 shows the huge rise of this group of businessmen, virtually unknown until then. That year alone, five companies linked to the young businessman collected over $107 million, even though they had not yet reached the peak of the business with Venezuelan oil. The highest payroll payments in these companies were the salaries of Leal, 750,000 Mexican pesos a month (just over 37,000 dollars), and his mother and sister who were paid half a million pesos (25,000 dollars). The file with the 2019 accounting, also includes the salary of the grandmother, who that year earned 30,000 Mexican pesos a month (1,500 dollars).

EL PAÍS and Armando.info have been able to verify that Leal and his entourage used at least 50 companies to hide the money trail. Behind each business plan, there was a company to carry out his projects. In most cases, Leal did not appear as a partner, but as a legal representative. Veronica Esparza and her daughter Olga Maria Zepeda Esparza, or other family members, were usually behind the companies. In his broad portfolio, he also created structures in tax havens, where the identity of the partners does not openly appear in the records and where it is easy to hide high flows of money, thus evading tax payments. One of the companies is JLJ Technologies LLC, incorporated in Wyoming, ―a state of the Union that in practice serves as a tax haven―on March 20, 2019, where Leal was registered as the sole administrator. This company had no real business operation, but allowed Leal to hide the trail of the partners behind his companies.

He also created Mystic Universe, a company in the British Virgin Islands, ―the largest tax haven on the planet in terms of turnover and number of incorporated companies― which had a mirror company in Ontario, Canada. Both companies were incorporated by Leal in May 2019, in the course of his first trips to Caracas. According to the articles of incorporation reviewed, Leal owned 90% of the shares, while his mother, María Teresa Alfaro, and his sister, Carlota Jiménez, owned 5% each. On August 5, 2019, Mystic began operations as a holding-operating company that absorbed control of other companies linked to Leal.

One of the presentations prepared by Leal’s team assures that Mystic invested in companies engaged in technology, energy and commodities in America and other countries outside the continent. “Mystic Universe’s goal is to change the world; hence, we focus on core industries ⸺energy, technology, commodities, finance and healthcare,” is a statement that stands out in the document. On its former website, Mystic claimed to have invested more than $300 million. But all the beneficiaries of Mystic’s investments were other companies of Leal.

Mystic was presented in the Mexican media as a Canadian investment fund focused on social impact projects. In media pieces published between August and September 2019, it was announced that the company would invest in Hábitos Luzy, the Mexican subsidiary of Luzy Technologies, a company that has been blacklisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury since June 2020. On paper, the company specializes in providing health and food advice through a mobile app, managing industrial canteens and reselling sanitary products.

Leal, who constantly devised how to reorganize his vast portfolio of companies through trusts, front companies and front men, approached Morgan Stanley investment banking on April 16, 2020, to assess the option of Mystic Universe being listed. Mystic’s CFO was José Luis Chávez Calva, who was a general coordinator at the state-owned Energy Regulatory Commission (September 2016 to June 2017). He was one of the two persons considered to lead the Federal Electricity Commission, the main government company in the sector. The politician, Manuel Bartlett, was finally appointed the position.